... The Red Cross aid workers often faced “impossible situations” in their missions abroad. Such situations—affectively and ethically impossible somehow, impasses from which there is no obvious good way forward—also arise in anthropological research. Like anthropologists, aid workers are sometimes...

...The Impossible Situation This chapter examines an anomalous moment in Beethoven’s opera, the one place where speaking voice is accompanied by music (a combination that defines melodrama). It suggests that the inventiveness of this moment does not so much suggest a way beyond the political...